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The article explores some of the underlying factors leading to a toning down, and in some instances total exclusion, of the concept of teaching in the broader educational discourse, which as a result is alienating teachers as well as educational research with such foci. Therefore, what is argued in this article is that there is a need to re-invent teaching as a liberating force of education. The importance of teaching, we suggest, is that as a concept and practice it opens up for emancipation and change, while learning as it currently appears in educational discourse hinders both. We conclude the article by suggesting two important tasks ahead in order to re-invent teaching as a liberating force in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I explore the changing relation between education and the state as this is expressed through a new language of education within Sweden, structured by terms such as the knowledge society, life-long learning and validation. I read closely a policy document on life-long learning, taking as my point of departure the 'authentic state', a state that is possible only when the desires of individuals for a good life are made the conditions of democratic society. What the reading illuminates is that what is taken for granted within the new language of education is instead an 'agentic' state in which the will of the individual is subordinated to the will of the state and that this is most profoundly expressed through the subject position offered the individual, what I call Homo economicus. Thus the knowledge society tends to be a society that excludes the idea of education understood in any terms other than economic ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's response to Claudia W. Ruitenberg's essay "Learning to Articulate: form Ethical Motivation to Political Demands." The author argues that Ruitenberg's perspective of democracy seems to deny the constitutive nature of disagreement. According to him, this viewpoint leads to the abandonment of the very dimension of deliberation which is truly political. He believes that the issue of disengagement is not about learning at all, but instead, it is about our attentiveness to the way in which we understand and respond to the things that we see and hear.